Burning flags

Alright. Let's get this done. There's flag burning in the air and it's bull plop.
If there is (given that the correct number of states ratify) an amendment to the Constitution of the United States that prohibits the burning of the American flag, well three things will be true:

1) The Constitution would, for the second time, prohibit the individual free action of Americans consistent with their free exercise of liberty. The only other time that's been done was Prohibition. And we know that turned out real well.

2) What the fuck? The Constitution was established to constrain the power of government to regulate the free conduct of citizens. Are we really prepared to constrain the free expression of Americans because you don't like the way they express themselves? Get ready for such an amendment to turn into a justification for the government to prohibit all manner of free speech that is inconvenient for their political purposes. There's a reason that it's the FIRST Amendment.

3) I hate the people that burn the flag. That's just douchebaggery, burning the flag is iconoclasm (literally) and it's stupid and offensive and I have no truck with those who would burn the flag to make a point, because they could a make their point better if they stopped smoking the weed long enough to do something about the world instead of acting like assholes and staging dumbass protests. Make America better, don't hate America.

That said: The day that burning the Stars and Stripes becomes unconstitutional, I'll burn that motherfucker, and I'll burn it proud. Because my family and friends that did military service did service to ensure that I could express freedom so far as to BURN THE FLAG. 'Cause America is more than the fucking flag. America is great exactly because our nation is so strong we can even burn our flag and let that be patriotism. Who else can say that? That's the essence of the promise of American freedom. We're so free that we can even hate our own country from time to time. That's real freedom motherfucker. You make that unAmerican, then that Constitution, that I know and revere, is tainted with unAmericanism. And that would be the worst thing ever.

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The Undeservedly Obscure Dead

Ladies, gentlemen, children up past your bedtime, and unreconstructed degenerates of all sorts: I give to you the newest in our line of remembrances of the Undeservedly Obscure Dead. Her name is Mme. Antonie Brentano (nee, von Birkenstock). Born in Vienna on April 28, 1780 to a noble family (her father was the Baron von Birkenstock, an important man at the imperial court), she married Franz Brentano, a wealthy Frankfurt merchant in 1798. Certainly Mme. Brentano is obscure, but why is she undeservedly so? Because she cheated on her husband in 1812 in Prague.

You see Antonie Brentano was perhaps the loveliest girl at court in Vienna and loved her husband, a handsome, by all accounts kind, and very wealthy man, but she hated Frankfurt. This is Frankfurt two centuries ago when it was a dreary, provincial, industrial center on a filthy little river. It was certainly not the Imperial Court at Vienna where she was more comfortable. So Antonie spent as much time in Vienna as she could. That's where her sister-in-law introduced her to a man ten years her senior in 1811 who was famous in Austria and throughout much of Europe.

He was immediately taken with her and they struck up a friendship immediately. She became a great source of joy and inspiration for the normally depressive and moody man. The two of them would meet almost everyday and they met secretly in Prague in July of 1812 and consummated their love. He even wrote some music for her, called the Diabelli Variations. But more famously, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote her a letter. Found among his possessions after his death, by his assistant and biographer Anton Schindler, it was unusual for it's length and passion. He never named her, but called her his Immortal Beloved.

She is, perhaps, the most famous muse in history, as much as for her anonymity as for the fact that she was apparently so remarkable that she was the great love and inspiration of Beethoven's life. One must marvel at that fact. He was a notoriously difficult man. She must have been a particularly amazing person of no mean gifts herself, if only to put up with him and still push him further. So we salute you, Antonie Brentano, and wonder admiringly at what a truly awesome woman you must certainly have been.

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TV tells me what to feel

I don't, y'know, do anything with my day. So while eating a frozen pizza and taking out the trash today I watched a rerun of The X-Files on cable. And I just want to say that the oboe-heavy soundtrack complete with tinkling piano and pizzicato violin strings is excellent. It's spooky, but not too serious. I say this because I hate, hate, hate the portentious music in bloated thrillers.
Also, what's up with Scully? She's abducted by aliens like half a dozen times and she's always so fucking sceptical about everything. I mean, just the one time on an alien ship would totally convince me to stop being all bitchy with my partner. Of course Mulder's wussitude isn't helping matters. Just saying.

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The solstice brings us good tidings

Often I despair for our world, and our Republic. I get up a read the news and see death and destruction and overfed white guys just generally fucking shit up for the rest of us, and I want to go back to bed and close my eyes and sleep for a thousand years until it all goes away. But then you see children playing in the park with their grandmother, or read a beautiful poem and faith is restored and a calm settles upon my aching heart; I am content and walk on with a smile and knowledge that all is not lost.
Today, again I have seen such greatness in the human soul manifest. Behold, like a flower unfolding in the sun, or a child's smile comes, "The Coreys":

Former teen heartthrobs Corey Feldman and Corey Haim have teamed with RDF USA ("Wife Swap") on "The Coreys," a hybrid improv comedy that would center on fictional versions of themselves a la "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
...
"The Coreys" picks up with Feldman living the comfortable suburban life with his wife Suzie and son, until circumstances bring his old pal Haim back into the picture. Episodes would follow Haim -- single and the total opposite of Feldman -- as he shakes life up for the Feldmans.

This is the greatest solstice gift I have ever received. Greater even that the gift of life itself!

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It's like wiping your ass with silk.

I am a particular fan of swearing. I am an unrepetent booster for cursing (and America! but mostly cursing). Following from this fact, I hold no truck with that old saw (and those that say it) that cursing is the sign of an ignorant mind and limited vocabularly, that you should be able to come up with something else rather that a dirty word. That is a certain kind of bullshit. Working blue is just using the whole vocabulary to make a fucking point or express a colorful sentiment. The acrobatic use of cussing is admirable and enjoyable.

Also, like in Falling Down, I just don't trust anyone who doesn't curse.

So I want to share with you my two favorite recent uses of potty-mouth. They're both excellent dialogue bits from HBO shows that I've had occassion to see in the last little bit of time.

From "Deadwood":

[The town's newspaper office has been busted up.]

Al: Why ain't you up and running again?

Merrick: I'm in despair. The physical damage is repairable, but the psychic wound may be permanent.

Al: You ever been beaten, Merrick?

Merrick: Once, when I thought I had the smallpox, Doc Cochrane slapped me in the face...

Al: [Slaps Merrick in the face.]

Merrick: Stop it, Al!

Al: Are you dead?

Merrick: Well, I'm in pain, but no, I'm obviously not dead.

Al: And obviously you didn't fuckin' die when the doc slapped you.

Merrick: No.

Al: So including last night that's three fuckin' damage incidents that didn't kill you. Pain and damage don't end the world, or despair, or fuckin' beatin's. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you've got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, but give some back.

And then, from "Entourage":

[Hollywood agent, Ari Gold is at couples therapy with his wife when his phone goes off].

Ari's Wife: [to therapist while Ari's phone rings] I ask for one hour out of the day. For his undivided attention. And I can't even have that!

Ari: You can have it if you want to live in Agora-fucking-Hills, and go to group therapy. But if you want a Beverley Hills mansion, and you want a country club membership, and you want nine weeks a year at a Tuscan villa, then I'm going to have a take a call when it comes in at noon on a motherfucking WEDNESDAY!

Ari's Wife: See? That's what I mean.

Ari: I...Y'know what? I have to take this. [Leave's therapist's office] There better be a scud missle headed toward's Beverley Hills, Eric.

Eric: No there's a fucking iceberg, Ari, James Cameron is directing Aquaman.

Ari: Fuck You! Where'd you hear that? Friendster?

Eric: No, I heard it from Josh Weinstein you jerk-off. Now get your hand off your dick and go call somebody.

Ari: [Exiting building and talking rapidly to his assistant on his cell] I don't care if he's in the fucking Arctic Shelf, get James Cameron on the phone, get Dana Gordon on the phone, and tell her assistant that if she does not call me back, I will fuck her worse than I did in Cabo in 1992! I'm gonna be there in 90 seconds find out who covers Warners. If all this is not taken care of I will choke you out with a strap-on!

Fuckin'-A, man.

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I love art

But I like art people just as well.
this warms the cockles of my heart (or it would, if I had a heart instead of a moaning void of blackness in the left side of my chest).
From the Independent (UK):

Royal Academy rejects sculpture but loves plinth

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent

Published: 15 June 2006

When the artist David Hensel was told that his sculpture of a laughing face had been selected for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, he was thrilled. But his delight turned to puzzlement when he searched the show high and low before discovering that only its plinth was on display.

Somewhere during the selection process - when Royal Academicians choose from among nearly 10,000 works submitted for inclusion by members of the public - the head and the base were separated. And it emerged yesterday that the selectors had judged each on its merits. They admired the plinth enormously but rejected the head.

The world of art is a mysterious place.

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Brooks on Books

David Brooks has written a column in the New York Times (It's behind the Times Select Barrier, but these two fine blogs written by serious people have rundowns.) Brooks begins by talking about some research that suggest that girls and boys are different. I know, I know, who would have thunk it. But here's where he throws that David Brooks curve ball: The implication of these differences is that boys shouldn't be forced to read books by or about women because it will force them to hate reading. No word yet on whether girls having been forced to read books almost exclusively by and for men for the last 2000 years has had a negative impact on girls--but that's clearly not important. The simple fact is that men no longer overwhelmingly dominate higher education (though they remain the majority of professors, professionals, and policy makers) so there must be a crisis in the classroom.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a pet peeve of mine that Brooks either buys into or at least pretends to for the "benefit" of his readers. He refers to high school reading lists as full of "feelings and stuff" that turn off boys because of the presence of many female writers. So here goes, though surely not for the last time: more or less all art is about feelings and stuff and other "girly" things. Shakespeare and Tolstoy and, yes, masculinist monomaniac Hemingway all write about feelings. If boys were never asked to develope some sense of empathy with their fellows or with--god forbid!--women, through literature and art, then, well, then the world would be filled with even more douchebags.

There's also a corrollary to this point. Namely that while all art is about feelings, not all art is about the same feelings. This is an individual property, not one sorted by groups. So all female writers do not write about the same things. Just because a lady writes it does not a tear jerker make. I hate Wuthering Heights, it's a silly novel about an absurd melodrama that never invests enough in it's characters to get me to care about them. This, I believe, is because Emily Bronte is not a great writer. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is exactly the opposite--it is a brilliant novel. In fact, it's a satire of the sort of novel that Wuthering Heights aspires to be. Oh, and the particular novel that Austen is satirizing, Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, is also (I think) pretty good.

The point is that different books are different and you don't know if you'll like them unless you give them a shot. And there is a classroom purpose that is denied when reading lists are tailored to students so that they never have to stretch their perspectives. If boys do worse than girls when they read a diverse array of literature, then maybe the solution is that boys should work on that a little more--if only because that's the exact suggestion people like Brooks give to girls when they do worse on math.
Oh, wait, affirmative action in the classroom is only okay to help boys in A.P. English, everyone else has to many advantages already.

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I want a gyro

I walked down the road today to find that the Greek restaurant a block from my apartment is closed for good. I really had my heart set on a gyro. And the other two places within walking distance are shitty. If I don't get a gyro, firemen will have to be called in for the aftermath. Firemen and trauma counselors.

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